From a note from Google PR:
Starting this morning, users who visit any English language Google News page will see RSS | Atom links. When a user has a feed reader installed, clicking on either of these links will generate a feed of current stories related to the page they’re looking at. In addition, many feed readers can also “auto-detect” the feed and import it into the reader automatically. Google News feeds are similar to Google Alerts whereby readers receive headlines and teasers with a link to click through directly to the news source to read the full story.
Check it out here.
Finally.
They spent so long disabling anyone who turned a persistent news search into a feed, they should know how to make an RSS feed by now…
But really, this makes me very happy. No more email alerts and I can have dueling Yahoo and Google RSS news feeds….
One thing that hasn’t been discussed yet is the inclusion of the “ned” parameter in the news feed url. Notice that this additional key is long enough to be unique and unnecessary to the functionality of the feed. See my version of the param here: news.google.com/nwshp?ned=&output=rss&ned=:ePkh8BM9E2IFGmrACaKSDNggBgPZGRA22HyEE4phNgEAqJcHTw
This does not worry me personally; I am not a privacy/conspiracy theory chicken little, but to me it is yet another interesting step by one of the big players in content distribution towards tracking and learning from what their audience behavior is. Similar to the search history features, they are beginning to offer compelling functionality that may encourage users to share quite a bit of themselves with the Google logs.
Now consider what happens with feeds and how we share them, sign up from multiple machines, etc, etc, and the conspiracy panic can end: this is not a point of singularity by which we can be hawked; it’s just another rung on the ladder toward that identity-tracking nirvana.